Why are jokes humorous? Why will we snicker? In humorous odd, Mikita Brottman demurs from fresh scholarship that takes laughter-- and the wider area of humor and the comical--as a releasing social strength and an endearing element of self-expression. For Brottman, there's not anything humorous approximately laughter, that is much less attached to mirth and emotions of excellent will than to a nexus of darker feelings: worry, aggression, disgrace, anxiousness.

This quantity brings jointly a number of the papers awarded via top students, artists and psychoanalysts at an annual Creativity Seminar organised by way of the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs middle. taking a look at creativity via a psychoanalytic lens - and intensely importantly, vice versa - the authors learn nice works, corresponding to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mahler's 8th Symphony, and William Gibson's The Miracle employee; in addition to nice artists, similar to Van Gogh and Lennon and McCartney, for what we'd know about the artistic approach itself.

Including Ferenczi, Karl Abraham was once possibly Freud's so much artistic and dedicated disciple. during this ebook, after outlining the socio-cultural context of the day, Isabel Sanfeliu examines Abraham's existence as a pupil, his relatives setting and his first steps as a doctor and psychoanalyst. As a medical physician Abraham used to be calm and indifferent, and an outstanding instance of a reliable and target analyst.

Psychoanalysis and neurological medication have promoted contrasting and probably irreconcilable notions of the trendy self. considering Freud, psychoanalysts have depended on the spoken be aware in a healing perform that has revolutionized our realizing of the brain. Neurologists and neurosurgeons, in the meantime, have used fabric apparatus—the scalpel, the electrode—to probe the workings of the fearful approach, and in so doing have considerably reshaped our knowing of the mind.